A couple of Saturdays ago, my co-worker Sonya and her boyfriend, Adam, invited Kamran and me to our first night of bowling in New York. It was inside the super-sketchy port authority, so we were nearly-mugged and actually-raped approximately twenty times between the subway exit and the velvet ropes leading into the bowling alley, but there was a private lane and 176 ounces of beer awaiting us that made it well worth the pain and suffering.

Once we were inside, it wasn’t sketchy at all. There were people lounging around the round bar in the middle, and one whole side of the place had been made to look like a club with plush white seats and wispy white curtains hanging from the ceiling with little white lights all around. While we waited for our lane to become available, we stood near the racks of shoes with black and red size numbers on them, and Sonya gasped at a sign that read, “Black for men. Red for women,” thinking that it said, “For black men.” And then we made all sorts of segregation jokes.

We finally settled in our lane next to another double-date, and the two men in the party couldn’t stop looking at Sonya, which I enjoyed. Kamran and Adam jumped right into the game

but then got a little antsy when the beer took too long to arrive:

But when it did, it arrived IN A TOWER. And oh, the glory that ensued:

The greatest thing was that Sonya and Adam had absolutely no professional bowling form yet completely kicked our asses in the first two games. They’d grab some 15-pound balls, walk up to the line all calm-like, set the ball down with a gentle roll, and get strikes every time.

Meanwhile, I’d told Kamran at dinner beforehand that I have a bad habit of accidentally letting the ball go when my arm’s behind me and often end up flinging it back toward my resting opponents, and he’d suggested that I make a concerted effort to control that. So of course I did it on my very first turn.

Sonya and Adam were super-competitive and were cheering for each other’s every flub, but it was Kamran who proved the skilledest at drunken bowling and won the final game with the hearty score of 112. I think he was high on adrenaline from singlehandedly protecting the integrity of our beer tower from the grubby hands of a would-be thief. And by that, I mean that he told the guy, “Hey, uh, this is our beer,” and the guy backed off and said, “Oh, my bad.”

The tower was empty by 1:15, so we posed for some prom-esque pictures on the way out

and then did the robot all the way home.